Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds shows us how close to the edge we are. Joan Didion in Slouching Towards Bethlehem

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husband’s necks. Anything can happen. Raymond Chandler in Trouble is My Business

…very scary, very stressful, very strange week here in L.A., where we work, where we live, where our kids go to school. Jimmy Kimmel

I looked at IRS data and learned that in 2021 (the most recent year for which there was data) LA County paid more in income taxes than all but four states. Philip Bump‬ on Blue Sky

Poor LA, it is a place of so many disasters, and now three devastating fires at once. It is heartbreaking.

And I think it is part of what makes LA so captivating. Michele and I love Los Angeles; it is so alive and so vibrant. It’s a sprawling wonderfulness that can’t be contained; LA covers the flat desert valley floor and climbs into the mountains that surround it. It is a place with a feeling of impermanence that insists its occupiers take both intellectual and artistic risks because, “What the hell, why not try it? We might not be here tomorrow.”

Living in LA is living on the edge; it is earthquake country, where the San Andres Fault bends east. LA is not even on the North American Plate; it is on the Pacific Plate that, here, is banging into the North American Plate as it grinds by. And – and this is a big and – LA is Santa Ana country.

People I know or meet who have moved here from the East or Midwest complain that there are no actual seasons in California, especially Coastal Southern California. They claim that the climate is blandly warm, blandly almost perfect. That is partially true; the climate doesn’t have the extremes of most of the world, but mixed in with that hospitable weather are weather catastrophes.

When it rains, it is often a torrential subtropical rain that lasts days. Washing out the hills and sending houses sliding toward the valley floor. Then there are the Santa Anas, strong dry winds that dry out the land, making it susceptible to fire that it whips up into firestorms. When I lived in the LA area during the late 50s and early 60s, it seemed like the hills were on fire every year; sometimes, huge fires like Malibu in 1956 and Bel Air in 1961. The fires make the place feel violent and unpredictable.

It is a place that probably should be inhabited by, I don’t know, maybe 50,000 humans, max, living in the canyons and along the river. But Los Angeles has a population of over eighteen million people. Eighteen million people that have dug in to stay. It is one of the most culturally dense places on earth, with 98 symphony orchestras, 200 professional theater companies, and about 780 museums, including the California African American Museum, the US Navy Seabee Museum, the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology – which has the largest collection of bird nests in the world – and LACMA (the Los Angeles County Museum of Art). It has the Finnish Folk Art Museum and the First Original McDonald’s Museum. And, of course, there are the vanity museums founded by local billionaires: The Broad, the Armand Hammer Museum, and the J. Paul Getty Museum (two J.Paul Getty museums). 

We love LA because it is so big and so glamorous. When the chairman of Jaguar Cars was asked why they were bringing Jaguar back to the United States when the crash and pollution standards were so strict, and it would be so costly to meet them with a European car. He answered, “Because there are more people in L A County who can afford our cars than people in all of Europe.” What he didn’t say is that LA is full of the kind of people who buy Jaguars.

Michele and I love Los Angeles because of our love for plants. Los Angeles is a city of plants, with lush private gardens and even lusher public botanical gardens. Almost anything grows in Los Angeles; it is a plant paradise. However, this is a paradise that is almost all man-made, just like the millions of flammable buildings that cover the flat valley and steep hills.

The United States saw an 18.1% increase in homelessness this year. AP

We want our politicians to be transparent, yet we want them to be powerful as well, and power, even in the best of circumstances, means the management of information, and telling the truth is not managing the information. Nathan Heller in The New Yorker.

Last year, the hottest on record, was not a good year for the world, so saying Happy anything seems slightly daft and delusional. The news seems so bleak; I get in the car, turn on the radio to some random NPR news program, and almost immediately get unsettled. Even the good news, “Assad flies to Russia, Syria taken over by repentant Islamic terrorists.” is not Oh, boy! That’s great! good news. The almost everyday anchors of the news cycle are Russia’s brutal attacks on the Ukrainian people and infrastructure and Israel slowly turning into a quasi-Nazi state with Palestinians as the victims. ( Growing up in a family that idealized the fledgling Israel state, acknowledging that reality is difficult and makes me very uncomfortable.)

Then there is soon-to-be President Trump, who is already dominating the National zeitgeist. I hope he does well; I really do. I disagree with a significant percentage of what he says he wants to do, and I hope those plans don’t actually work out, but Trump also says he will keep us out of any new wars. I hope he delivers on that. I just hope he doesn’t fuck up our beautiful, even if flawed, country.

To change the subject, President Jimmy Carter died a couple of days ago. I will miss him. I think the country will miss him, too. I think Carter’s death comes at a good time, at 100, for him and at this troubled National time when we so need his virtues. His honesty and, as importantly to me, at least, his ability to see the world as it is rather than as we want it to be are two needed qualities that are in short supply today.

I first heard of Jimmy Carter and got to know him, so to speak, in my car while in a light snowstorm in the middle of northern Nevada. I turned on the radio, hoping to get a local station with a weather report, and what I got was what I thought was a random Southerner talking about US foreign policy. Surprisingly, the speaker, who had been schooled in the Navy’s nuclear submarine program by taking graduate work in nuclear physics and reactor technology at Union College, was knowledgeable, brilliant, and thoughtful.

That’s how I still think of President Carter: knowledgeable, brilliant, and thoughtful. Although they are not attributes, along with telling the truth, that are as useful as President as I would like. Early in his presidency, a decade before Al Gore, Carter accepted that the Climate crisis was real and acted on it. In June of 1979, he installed 32 solar water heating panels on the roof of the White House (Reagan had them removed in 1986; thinking, I guess, why have solar panels when all a President has to do is say, “It’s morning in America”?).

Being knowledgeable, brilliant, and thoughtful are also the qualities, along with Carter’s deep-seated decency, that contributed to President Carter losing his reelection bid. However, they were not the only reasons that former Georgia Governor Carter lost. He was an outsider in a world where being an insider is essential, and he was unlucky (a very underrated, even, if hard to define, asset).

Theodor White, a Presidential historian who interviewed Carter, wrote in America in Search of Itself that Carter’s chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, spoke about the broad arch of Carter’s presidency while Carter was bogged down in trivialities and minutia. I think this translated into President Carter’s inability to react quickly to attacks, change, or world crises (quickly is the operative word here).

The United States Government itself is being bogged down in trivialities, and minutia is also part of why Vice-president Kamala Harris lost her election. There are several things that Biden did that infuriate me, and there are several that I thought were stupid or self-serving – at best – but, by and large, Biden had a much better-than-average four years, passing some very progressive programs that would help many of the people who voted against Harris. But, the government moves so slowly that most of the results haven’t come to fruition. It has been four years since President Trump tried to lead a failed self-coup, and Attorney General Merrick Garland was still “crossing all the ts and dotting all the is “and was on his way, methodically, to presenting a case. Of course, it’s now 2025; Trump will be President, and too late to go to court.

Speaking of 2025, I don’t want to make any predictions except that 2025 will be hotter than 2024 and President Trump will get richer (or rich, if you think he is not really rich now). I hope the Russian war on Ukraine will end in Ukraine’s favor (and it just might; Russia is not doing well financially or militarily, although Putin will probably have to go for that to happen).

Happy New Year!!!

There will be some on the left who will say Trump won because of the inherent racism, sexism, and authoritarianism of the American people. Apparently, those people love losing and want to do it again and again and again. David Brooks in an NYT editorial.

Voted Trump, but I like you and Bernie. I don’t trust either party’s establishment politicians. An anonymous voter answering AOC’s question “People who supported [President-elect] Trump & me OR voted Trump/Dem, tell us why.” 

We are home; we had a great trip, and I want to write about it. But now that we are home, Trump and the election seem to be everywhere, crowding out everything else. Writing about our enjoyable trip to Japan without acknowledging the trauma caused by Trump winning the election seems insensitive. Still, that’s where Michele and I have been during the last month rather than experiencing the collective trauma.

I don’t say collective disparagingly, but only that it exists. Being in the US after the election is like seeing a horror show in a crowded theater, and being in Japan, wandering around Joetsu checking for results on an iPhone, is like watching the same horror show at home. Yeah, the plot is the same, but the emotional impact is very different. I feel guilty about that, guilty that I should be more upset than I am.

I don’t like Donald Trump; I think he is a lout, a narcissist, and a con man. He has failed at almost everything he’s tried; he’s incompetent. He failed at making money with a casino, he even failed at selling steaks, and he certainly failed at running the government the first time around. However, he succeeded at the hard job of winning the presidency (although with a lot of help from the Democrats). In the end, I’m more worried about the chaos President Trump will create than his successfully becoming a fascist.

I do like Kamala Harris; I was happy to vote for her and think she would have done a good job. Harris was the first candidate I voted for – rather than against the opponent – since Obama. I thought she was going to win. But she didn’t. She lost to a guy almost half the nation thinks is a fascist in waiting. It was shocking and very discouraging.

It is easy just to write the whole thing off as “Trump voters are just stupid.” But Trump voters aren’t stupid. They are pissed – I haven’t met a Trump voter who wasn’t pissed – not only do they think they have been screwed out of a lot of money, but – and this is probably more important – they feel they have been disrespected. And they have, and we’ve been complacent accomplices.

David Brooks theorizes that that disrespect started back in the sixties when the draft was changed to exclude men who were in college. I tend to agree. That sent a strong signal that the people running the country think college-educated men are worth more than working men. We elite even said as much when we justified taking fellow elites out of having to do a stint in the military. That preference for the college-educated by the college-educated snow-balled into the people’s President touting the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs to any place with cheaper labor and opening the borders to allow large numbers of very poor people willing to work for lower wages into the country.

We all saw the growing disparity in income and respect between the college-educated elites and the rest of the nation, sort of subliminally, but Donald Trump really saw it, and he also saw the discontent that disparity was sowing and the disrespect the college-educated elites had for anyone who wasn’t one of them. Still, very few lawmakers saw it on the left and right. And don’t forget that Trump ran against both the Republican and Democratic establishment. To be fair, it’s hard to see and relate to people who are outside of our socioeconomic class, and the average member of Congress is worth $7,888,502 (according to Ballotpedia).

When I read the postmortems, although there are still many people who blame the loss on racism, misogyny, and voter stupidity, it seems the Democratic Party is starting to ask what it did so wrong that Trump actually won. In my opinion, that is the only good news that has come out of this tragedy. Maybe this election will be a long overdue eye opener.